Thank you very much, Ms. Block, for your kind words and for your question.
It is, in my view, the primary responsibility of any government, and certainly our department, to care first and foremost for those men and women who, having chosen it as a profession, willingly put themselves in harm's way as part of the unlimited liability in the job description they take on.
Particularly given the high tempo of operations in Afghanistan, we have seen a necessity to increase both the number of mental health professionals and the amount of direct investment into care for the ill and injured.
You quite rightly point out that the mental health care component of that effort needs to be highlighted. We have undertaken--and I'll come back to the question of the budget--to double the number of mental health care professionals within the employ of the Canadian Forces. As the most direct way to deliver both mental health services and regular health services and to ensure that past and present members of the Canadian Forces and their families are able to access those services, we have set up across the country what are called joint personal support units. These are meant to be locations where members of the Canadian Forces, their families, and veterans can go to streamline the process of accessing programs. They provide information to point them in the right direction and ensure that both regular force members and reservists are getting the care they need. This is a substantial improvement over the way these services were provided in the past.
Given the breadth and width of our country, you can appreciate that providing those services in rural parts of the country is a little more challenging, but these joint personal support units are designed to help ensure ease of access.
We've also invested in areas of new communications--that is, online access to services to help direct people in the right direction as well.
We've made tremendous strides in recent years in the effort to support the families, because we have found that in the past there were shortcomings, particularly around the very basic subjects of stress, deployment-related mental health conditions, and support for the families. We recognize that if we don't have sufficient support for the entire family unit, it will be a failing on our part.
There is always going to be more to do. I'm not suggesting for a moment that we don't still have challenges before us, but we have made improvements. We've appointed a special adviser for operational stress injuries. We have a skilled mental health team fanning out across the country with more clinics and more psychological services. Some of this is done on a per diem basis.
We have looked across the world at how other countries are doing it and have tried to find best practices that we can transplant back home. We've also increased the amount of interaction between the Department of National Defence and Veterans Affairs Canada, because, as you can appreciate, some of our clientele are no longer serving, yet we still owe them very much a debt of responsibility and obligation. We've invested millions in technology, in infrastructure, in new employees, and in other areas that I can define in more detail for you. We are committed to providing the best possible service for the men and women who are providing us with their very best.